Richard Wordingham <richard dot wordingham at ntlworld dot com> wrote:

> The sorting order is not defined by the numerical of code points, but
> it has to be tailored for each _language_ - for example English, Welsh
> and Spanish have different sorting orders for combinations of lower
> case unaccented letters! (For example, Welsh and Spanish both treat
> double 'l' as a separate letter.)

This is not universal in Spanish. While ch ("che") and ll ("elle") are
still taught as individual letters in Spanish, a great deal of sorting
is now done using the so-called "modern" sort order, which unlike the
"traditional" order treats them as a simple sequence of c+h and l+l
respectively.

This "modern" sort order was almost certainly the end result of software
that failed to take Spanish-specific sorting rules into account, but it
is now a fact of life in many Spanish-speaking areas.

-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/